Making a WiKi in Second Life

Following the previous post describing my attempt at producing a Forum in Second Life. I decided to complete the circle by making this post showing a similar project at making a WiKi. I regularly get my students to make use of Moodles WiKi for their project work, and every time given the unpredictable and organic way in which the pages of a WiKi are likely to link and grow, I find that the job of trawling through the project can seem to result an exercise of diminishing returns for me. And so my thoughts turned to the far more visual and semi-immersive world of Second Life.

You can see from the screen shot that the project has three main areas of Design, Coding and Testing; a specific example using the WiKi for Software Design. The intention here is to have submissions placed onto the appropriate surface starting on the vertical scale at day 1. Of course in a normal WiKi, pages would be hyperlinked, but here I am suggesting that relationships are formed by association, where related postings are placed next to each other on the same day or above on subsequent days.

Each posting takes the form of a prim cube, whose texture and text will have been generated and uploaded from a Word template.

Once in place, a posting can be touched producing a dialogue menu, with options allowing Notecard text to be emailed, or the full Notecard given. The third option is a feature that I encourage, whereby a screen shot of the topic, say a design diagram, code section or test strategy, can also be uploaded into the prim to be displayed on the surface of a 3D screen.

The screen is rezzed each time with sides in both landscape and portrait for ease of viewing. This last feature I included to encourage the social dimension of Second Life, now the group can arrange to meet at the WiKi and review posting together.

Even from a superficial look, you can see how easy it becomes to form an overview of the projects development and activity. I must admit here to also having an almost intuitive sense of anticipation that the sheer physical forms that will come to emerge will in themselves provide a new and valuable insight, though of course this remains to be seen.

If you would like to see the project in action then just follow the link here to YouTube.

Please feel free to post any comments and of course drop into my place at Shimmer Island in Second Life anytime.